I thought you all might be interested in Frank Tipler's response to Stephen Hawking (and to me from a previous discussion about God and the soul). If you have any thoughts on this exchange please feel free to pass them along. Frank didn't want to give out his e-mail, but I said I would pass along any opinions on this exchange.
Also, another point Hawking made in his big public lecture that I found rather interesting (the lecture was entitled PREDICTING THE FUTURE: From Astrology to Black Holes), was that the evidence for string theory is even less than that for astrology, but that he believes in string theory but not in astrology because it is consistent with physical laws and the equations.
To reiterate, here is my question to Stephen Hawking at Caltech on Thursday, March 12, and his answer:
"You've been talking about the Omega Point and the Anthropic Principle. What is your opinion of your cosmologist colleague Frank Tipler's book, THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY, and his theory that the Omega Point will reach back from the far future of the universe into the past to reconstruct every human who ever lived or who ever could have lived in the ultimate Holodeck?"
Hawking sat their for a minute typing out his answer:
"MY OPINION WOULD BE LIBELOUS."
Frank Tipler writes:
I have two basic problems with my colleagues about the Omega Point Theory. The first is that all the knowledge that almost all of them have of the theory comes from people who are not technically trained in the physics. For example, in your phrasing that the "Omega Point reaches back from the far future into the past ..." this is not what happens in my theory. The future cannot reach back into the past (except in a very subtle sense which is not relevant to the resurrection -- if you were a physicist I would simply say, "least action"). Rather, what happens is that intelligent life in the far future reconstructs all possibilities consistent with what they know about the past. This is simply a vastly scaled up version of what we ourselves are now doing in trying to reconstruct our ultimate ancestor, the first living cell. Chemical evolution laboratories all over the world are now systematically trying all possibilities.
That there are only a finite number of possibilities today to try follows directly from the Bekenstein Bound, which Hawking accepts (see the BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME). That life in the far future will have the capability to try them all, at an insignificant relative cost, follows directly from the mutual consistency of the known laws of physics (see below). It's a pity that the question of reconstruction was not put to Hawking this way. You know that David Deutsch, who has just been awarded the Dirac Medal for his invention of the quantum computer, writes in his book THE FABRIC OF REALITY, that I am quite correct that a sufficiently advanced civilization can reconstruct everyone in the computers of the far future. Deutsch also writes in his book that he thinks my Omega Point Theory will one day be accepted as the correct theory of the far future. I agree; for all I do in my work is accept the logical consequences of the known laws of physics: quantum mechanics, relativity, and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. I'm not proposing any new laws of physics, just asking people to accept the logical consequences of the laws they claim to accept. Libelling the OPT is equivalent to libelling the known laws of physics. I can assure you that the laws of physics are quite indifferent.
E pour si mouve!
The second problem I have with my colleagues is that almost all contemporary theology STILL presupposes the truth of Aristotelean physics. This being the case, scientists naturally suppose theology is nonsense, or in a separate realm from science. With the almost unique exception of Pannenberg, theologians encourage them in this latter opinion. Only if theology is kept separate can it retain its Aristotlean physical basis.
Michael, you yourself are a good example of this resistance to using modern science in defining religious concepts. You repeatedly insist on defining the "soul" as an "immaterial material" (Hobbs' phrase; "substantial form" was Aquinas' term), a sort of ghostly white stuff inhabiting the body. From this ridiculous concept arise the equally silly ideas that ghosts could exist, and that the soul of one person could contact the soul of another without the assistence of normal matter (psychic phenomena).
To your great credit, you know ghosts and ESP don't exist. You yourself have provided some of the evidence that they don't by your exposure of psychic frauds. But you won't give up psychic definition of soul! You keep the definition, and say, "the `soul' doesn't exist" (correct claim, with this definition). But words are used to help us understand reality. Indeed they have no other purpose! I claim that your traditional approach to religious concepts will inadvertently make you throw out the baby with the bath water. The reality that the ancients were trying to capture in the word "soul" is expressed by defining the soul to be a computer program being run on the human brain. With this re-definition, we can keep the religious concept, and make it consistent with the facts. But most importantly, the re-definition makes the scientist realize that immortality is perfectly possible: there's no physical reason why a PROGRAM cannot exist forever. Some of the programs now coded in our DNA have been around billions of years. Keeping the old definition makes Hawking want to libel a person whose book's central postulate is that the biosphere can go on forever. Is postulating the immortality of the biosphere an evil postulate? Shouldn't we at least TRY to make it so? Should a person who tries to figure out how to use the known physical laws to make the biosphere immortal be ostracized from scientific society?
Similarly for the word "God". If He is identified with the Omega Point, then the key religious meanings of "God" are retained, with science and religion integrated. As he wrote at length in his paper that I sent you, the German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg (who has been called one of the three greatest theololgians of the 20th century), agrees that the OP is in all essentials the God of the Bible. It's easier for a German theologian to come to this conclusion than an English speaker. God's Name, given in Exodus 3:14, was translated by Martin Luther as ICH WERDE SEIN, DER ICH SEIN WERDE.
Failing to make this change of definition, which is to say, failing to give up Aristotlean physics, makes it difficult to accept the consequences of modern physics. These require the universe to terminate in its ultimate future in an Omega Point, a state of infinite knowledge, and infinite power. Refusing to change your definition of "God" impells you to reject modern physics. (Otherwise, who would care what is meant by "God"). Regreatably, most people think that modern physics is not the answer, and that's why most of them are quite willing to believe in psychic powers. Which is why you have to spend your time exposing psychic frauds.
Sincerely,
Frank Tipler
APPENDIX:
Why the Acceptance of the Known Laws of Physics
REQUIRES Acceptance of the Omega Point Theory
Astrophysical black holes almost certainly exist, but Hawking has shown that if black holes are allowed to exist for unlimited proper time, then they will completely evaporate, and unitarity will be violated. Thus unitarity requires that the universe must cease to exist after finite proper time, which implies that the universe has spatial topology $S^3$. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says the amount of entropy in the universe cannot decrease, but it can be shown that the amount of entropy already in the CBR will eventually contradict the Bekenstein Bound near the final singularity unless there are no event horizons, since in the presence of horizons the Bekenstein Bound implies the universal entropy $S \leq constant\times R^2$, where $R$ is the radius of the universe, and general relativity requires $R \rightarrow 0$ at the final singularity. The absence of event horizons by definition means that the universe's future c-boundary is a single point, call it the {\it Omega Point}. MacCallum has shown that an $S^3$ closed universe with a single point future c-boundary is of measure zero in initial data space. Barrow has shown that the evolution of an $S^3$ closed universe into its final singularity is chaotic. Yorke has shown that a chaotic physical system is likely to evolve into a measure zero state if and only if its control parameters are intelligently manipulated. Thus life ($\equiv$ intelligent computers) almost certainly must be present {\it arbitrarily close} to the final singularity in order for the known laws of physics to be mutually consistent at all times. Misner has shown in effect that event horizon elimination requires an infinite number of distinct manipulations, so an infinite amount of information must be processed between now and the final singularity. The amount of information stored at any given time diverges to infinity as the Omega Point is approached, since $S\rightarrow +\infty$ there, implying divergence of the complexity of the system that must be understood to be controlled.
\medskip Life transferring its information to a medium that can withstand the arbitrarily high temperatures near the final singularity $(T\geq constant/R)$ has several implications: first, $10^{-6} \leq \Omega_0 - 1 \leq 10^{-3}$, where $\Omega_0$ is the density parameter, and second, the Standard Model Higgs boson mass must be $220 \pm 20$ GeV. The details are in {\it The Physics of Immortality}.
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